In our lab, we tend to get wrapped up in the biggest and fastest solutions. But last week the most basic SSD showed up on the doorstep and caused us to re-think our focus for a few days. The Lexar NQ100 is a SATA SSD that starts at about $30 and tops out at 960GB. Typically the NQ100 would not be an SSD we’d get super excited about, but after testing the drive, we came out impressed. This kind of drive has a firm focus on budget PC builds, primarily as a hard drive replacement. So we went diving into refurb PC builds to see how much performance we could drive from a $150 budget PC with an SSD and most importantly, a Windows license.
In our lab, we tend to get wrapped u